Lanzarote: el papel de la crisis - Fundación César Manrique

oad; the planning of several golf courses, including one at Tías, with 18 holes, complete
with an accommodation capacity of 700 beds; six projects at the preparatory stage for the
southern part of the island; a network of nautical sports centres, which will take over the
coastal strip, stimulating real estate development in the area and knocking the marine
ecosystems off balance; drinking water production facilities; another runway at the airport,
after the recent opening of a new terminal; theme parks; perhaps two new tourist resorts,
one in the north and the other, in the south; hypermarkets, with one measuring 30,000 m2 already under way in Arrecife; and then, huge commercial ports, such as the extension
proposed for Playa Blanca, with a 650 m jetty. This list would not be complete without the
7,500 m2 commercial area, with an investment of Pta6,000m, the purpose of which is to
provide a maritime motorway linking Lanzarote up with Fuerteventura, the idea being to
receive cruiser tourism and residual day-tripper tourism coming from the neighbouring
island. As a result, Lanzarote will become Fuerteventura’s great theme park. Indeed, in
coming years, the shores of the Canary Islands will be the victims of fierce attacks on the
part of real estate companies. Money, promoters and parts of the administration are
focussing their attention on colonising the seashores, transforming them and making them
into a profitable enterprise. The warning lights are on along the coastlines of the Canary
Islands. Beset by the progressive degradation of the ecosystems, the development of nautical
sports centres and leisure facilities, the construction of piers and the extraction of
aggregate, in addition to lacking a protective, organisational plan, their situation is critical.
To put it briefly, they are beset by money, speculation and political greed.
Such a conglomerate of infrastructures is threatening to turn the island into a scenario of the
baroque, a huge, assorted amusement park, where the aberrations and bad habits of all the
continents come together while the island’s idiosyncrasies disappear into nothing, the
impossibility of adapting to the advantages of continental territory having been accepted. The
mass of investment planned or in progress, both in the building of accommodation (with a
rough estimate of more than 10,000 new places in the last two years alone) and in
infrastructure leaves little room for optimism and smacks of the ratification and
standardisation of Lanzarote as a tourist resort. This is a worrying outlook which, while
tracing unequivocal signs of non-sustainability on the horizon - seeped in the incense of the
empty environmental rhetoric used by political representatives -, calls for new forms or
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